Matti Bunzl, Anthropologist at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, describes the two permanent exhibits at Vienna’s Jewish Museum. The first is a room of holograms, each hologram containing images that collectively communicate a theme in Jewish experience. The theme Worship, for example, brought together images of Kiddush cups and Torah shields from different time periods. The holograms explored the idea of objects-as-heterotopias: they changed when viewed from different angles, they served as memory aids—they became mirrors for the visitor’s own history rather than dictating a history to the visitor. The holograms refused to assume historical, truthful authority. The second exhibit was essentially a sort of open storage room full of objects without labels, again encouraging the visitor to draw from their own experiences to make the objects important.

The museum has been often criticized for its lack of historical narrative; many visitors have found its interpretation of and memorial to the Holocaust inadequate. Bunzl explains how Jews have been manipulated as a group throughout the history of Austria—first, how they were excluded as degenerates to define a white Austria in contrast, then how they were absorbed and ignored in the wake of Austria-as-victim of the Nazis, and finally, how they have been celebrated as evidence that Austria is a liberal, European-Union-class nation. The curators of the museum have used their institution to defy the government’s manipulation—to encourage visitors to construct their own Jewishness. Unfortunately, this subtlety is often lost on the uninitiated visitor.

Ruth Phillips, Director of the Museum of Anthropology at the University of British Columbia, describes the direction toward the use of historical and cultural biographies of objects in interpretation as evidence of the emergence of a ‘Second Museum Age’, situated in response to the ‘First Museum Age’ of positivism and evolutionism a century earlier. She discusses the problems inherent in assigning objects to groupings such as ethnographic, archaeological, art, and historical, when objects may in fact be all of those things and more. Phillips takes a step further in explaining that the value of objects comes also from all the senses—audio, tactile, olfactory, and gustative in addition to visual.

She also discusses the effects that repatriation has had on the valuation of objects and interpretation, including collections-based research as another form of repatriation, and describing how indigenous types of interpretation and exhibition add layers of meaning to the objects presented and provide a different frame of reference for the selection of relevant information. Striking is her account of a ‘narrow escape’ in which the museum became a stage for First Nations chiefs demanding the attention of museums and the government to issues of repatriation. Central to the demonstration was the purposeful almost-breaking of a copper object from the museum’s collections in a traditional declaration of rivalry. While watching the ceremony, she realized that the copper was far more valuable for the statement it could facilitate in being broken than as an ethnographic specimen and did not stop the chief. In the end, he did not actually break the copper; he only mimed it. This new function of the museum as forum is so vital to Phillips’ Second Museum Age that the redesigning of the Museum of Anthropology to include spaces for indigenous consultation and study is one of two parts of her museum’s plan for renewal. The second is development of a more comprehensive online collections research database as a form of ‘virtual repatriation’.

Michel Foucault explains the concept of heterotopia: a mirror-realm of layered and interrelated truths without systematic, temporal, or spatial orders. He describes two types of heterotopias in societies: crisis heterotopias and heterotopias of deviation; ethnographic museums are an example of both in that they house collections of cultures and histories in an attempt to create a place outside time, and in that they attempt to describe the other—those deviating from the ‘Western’ norm. His definition of heterotopia has provided an insightful framework for evaluating objects and museums. Foucault describes 6 principles of heterotopias: 1. that all cultures have heterotopias, 2. that society can change the ways in which heterotopias function (particularly useful as it applies to museums and new postmodern approaches), 3. that heterotopias can superimpose many conflicting and/or paradoxical elements in a single space (useful in describing the social and historical biographies of objects), 4. that the concept of heterotopia gives rise to the concept of heterochronia (of which a museum is an example, as it accumulates histories and objects with their own layered histories onto itself), 5. that heterotopias all have systems of inclusion and exclusion (some examples in museums are security screening, implied behavioral rules, etc.), and 6. that heterotopias function relative to the surrounding space (relevant to the idea of museum as microcosm of social, political, and economic relationships).